The importance of Climate Cafés and their essential role in this polycrisis

By: Christie Wilson and Eva Jahn

Climate Cafés are mushrooming up all everywhere:  In the remote Northern Territory of Australia, in a school room in Nipaluna, Hobart, Tasmania, in the beautiful landscape of the Ceres Learning Centre on Wurundjeri Country, Melbourne Australia, on a green space on Governors Island in New York, near a reservoir in Colorado, in a quiet cafe on Vancouver Island, in a conference room or an online space from your home. Each setting brings people together for a unique gathering of people. And every unique space provides a distinctive mural of people, landscapes, hopes, yearnings and stories. 

So, what is a Climate Café? 

Based on the idea of Death Cafés, created in 2004 by Swiss sociologist and anthropologist Bernards Crettaz, Climate Cafés are in-person or online gatherings where participants openly discuss their understanding, thoughts, feelings, artwork, dreams, fears and many other aspects of this polycrisis. They are usually between 1.5-2 hours long and facilitated to intentionally create a container for more in-depth exploration.  

Rebecca Nestor from Climate Psychology Alliance defines Climate Cafés as “a one-off, structured and advice-free space that intends to support and normalize the discussion of climate feelings by foregrounding the collective rather than the individual response to break the “socially constructed silence”. (Nestor, 2024)

Our Australian CERI faculty member Christie Wilson, a psychotherapist and climate and mental health manager at Psychology for a Safe Climate, describes it as such: Climate Cafés are “physical or virtual spaces for community members to share experiences and feelings related to climate change, biodiversity loss, and many other related topics. Climate Cafés are a kind process; they offer space for exploring non-hierarchical systems of communication and practice of deep listening to others and the quiet voice within ourselves, nested in place and in honour of Dr Miriam Rose's work of Dadirri.” 

Christie and her colleagues at Psychology for a Safe Climate have been offering Climate Cafés to their communities since 2019, and training facilitators since 2022 - in response to the increasing numbers of people distressed by the climate reality. The majority (80%) of Australians reported experiencing some form of disaster at least once since 2019, of which (63% said heatwaves, 47% flooding, 42% bushfires, 36% drought, 29% destructive storms, and 8% landslides). (Climate Council Survey, 2023). This experience of  increasing and intensifying climate-related disasters leaves behind waves of shock, grief and exhaustion as well as ramping up fears about climate-affected futures. Climate Cafés provide a protected space to gather and acknowledge all these feelings in an attentive and compassionate space. 

Christie explains that a “PSC Climate Café accommodates both the need for silence and the voicing of the diversity of participants' diverse lived experiences, which is a gifted opportunity to listen to a different view from your own, and the need for, at times, a shared silence. Listening and sharing is a starting place for us to find our way back to each other from where patriarchy, capitalism and colonization has forced us apart in the cruelest of ways.”

Climate Cafés welcome everyone, regardless of your knowledge of climate change knowledge or understandings. Just like the Death Cafes model, Climate Cafés break the social silence about a topic which has become taboo in contemporary life. By suspending interruptions, judgements and arguments, participants can explore their complex and changing emotions in the company of others. Through this process, people can put words to their varied emotions and experiences and enter into a learning process which can tease open tender topics like denial, cognitive dissonance, privilege, and systemic injustices. By engaging our defenses and dissonance to this crisis, often reinforced by privilege and white fragility, we together put words to our experiences and collectively take part in a learning process full of diverse responses. 

This well-contained, ritualized space provides a form of activism that is based on being rather than doing. However, this being is not disconnected from doing.  Christie repeatedly witnessed how when we come together “to share, to listen, to validate, and to feel a sense of belonging, we start to heal. Out of this healing,  grows a greater capacity to take action, which can take many forms, including organising or facilitating a Climate Café. 

You could say that Climate Cafés have become a quiet, steady political movement.

As Christie asks: “What is more potent than an increasing undertow of people gathering in small groups worldwide to talk about how they feel about the places, people, and things they love the most being threatened, harmed and driven to extinction?”

“Essentially, at the core” writes Christie, “we come to a Climate Cafe out of love: love we are searching for in ourselves, the love that we hold for family, friends, community, the love we have for other beings and ultimately,  if we allow ourselves to feel it … the love to protect life.''  (C.Wilson, 2024)

Immense gratitude for Christie Wilson and her important work in the Climate Café movement as well as Sally Gillespie for editing this blog.

CERI is excited to announce that we will offer two online climate cafes in collaboration with our Australian partner Psychology For A Safe Climate. Christie Wilson and Eva Jahn will be co-facilitating this international cafe in November and December.

Come and join us!

November 14th at 4-5:30pm MST / November 15th at 10-11:30am AEDT

December 12th at 4-5:30pm MST / November 13th at 10-11:30am AEDT